Drill Baby, Drill (Day 301)

A couple of weeks ago the county denied our request for a variance on the water pipe location (see previous blog). So that meant a different route (OK), but no way to enter the house, as in a punch out in the foundation. The obvious remedy was to drill through the foundation. So for a geologist this is no big deal. We drill stuff all the time. Rock cores for strength testing, cores for paleomagnetism, sediment cores for paleoclimate, anon, anon. Just rent a drill and punch out a couple of holes.

Well its a 8" concrete foundation riddled with rebar, thanks to our old friend Mikael (structural engineer). You know I'd find a place to drill through rebar and I did, but not until the second hole. Yes, second hole, because the first hole was into the crawl space and the second hole was from the crawl space to basement, where the Pex piping was stubbed out by the plumber.

Hadlock (Just Ask) Rental had their drill out on long-term rental so I went to A+ Rental down the highway. Sort of a rag tag operation, but they had a real man's drill and bit. 1/2 HP drill and 2" diamond bit was the ticket. Hook up the garden house for water cooling, pull it in, and let her spin. Had visions of Sarah Pallin standing behind me encouraging me to Drill it Baby. So I did. Took about 15 minutes to punch through, not bad. Then I moved the hose and power to the crawl space and started no. 2. All went well until I met "Uncle Rebar". Drill overheated, blew the entire circuit breaker and called for a time out. Two minutes later, I was back at it. This happened 3 or 4 times, but in about a half hour I broke through to the basement. Mission accomplished, and now I can see Russia from the second floor, just like Ms Pallin.

Progress was made on other fronts today. The cable guy (hard-wire internet) came buy and dropped off 200 ft of RG11 coax cable, which goes underground (with the H2O) from a street side junction box to the main electrical circuit panel. Qwest also dropped phone cable in my trench. So all the buried services (electrical, water, cable, phone) are in the ground and we're ready to push dirt around again. A little rain would help, but I'm not getting greedy.